Member Who Blurs Every Trail Feature Also Blurs the Log

The first reply under the harvest post was not a question about species. It was a bystander reading the image twice and reporting back: "I can see a shape," wrote Del Whitcombe of the Tuesday walk, at 6:04 p.m., under a photograph that had already been described by its own author as "the general area only."

The post had gone up at 5:51 p.m. with four images. In the first, a gravel access road had been smeared into wet clay. In the second, a trail junction went soft. By the third, the member, who blurs the painted blaze, the boulder, the bend, and, in one memorable October, a fern "because it grows everywhere and nowhere in particular", had turned the same attention to the growing medium. The log was blurred. The moss was blurred. The mushroom remained sharp against a background that had been reduced to a gray rectangle with a suggestion of fungus in the middle of it.

"The log is the substrate," the member wrote at 6:09 p.m., in reply to a request for a photograph of the substrate. "The substrate is the location. I'm not posting the location."

At 6:11 p.m.: "I understand the substrate is also the location."

At 6:14 p.m., under a fourth image that had been blurred so thoroughly the file appeared to contain weather: "I've removed the identifying features."

The identification chair opened the thread at 6:20 p.m. and closed it at 6:48 p.m. in the only way an identification chair can close a thread, with two words, posted in reply to the sharp, unblurred, plainly visible mushroom: "Spore print?"

What followed was a request the thread had not expected to make. Del Whitcombe, still at the keyboard, asked for a less helpful version. "Could you blur it again but from the other side," he wrote, and meant it. The member obliged at 7:02 p.m. with a photograph in which the mushroom had also been identified as a location, being, as it was, somewhere.

Vera Pike was asked to mediate at 7:15 p.m. and delivered a ruling at 7:40 p.m. that both parties described, within four minutes of each other, as siding with the other one.

Maeve's Field Corrections has logged this observation as follows: timestamped 5:51 p.m., a photograph of a specimen; timestamped 6:14 p.m., a photograph of a decision. We are retiring the earlier note. The sharp image has been superseded.

The member's position is not wrong, which is what makes it hard to file. Productive substrates are specific, specific substrates are locations, and locations in this hobby have a way of becoming a parking lot by the following weekend. The member has simply applied the rule past the point where a rule still has anything to hold. A log is a place to stand, and also, now, the reason nothing can be said about what is standing on it.

Silas Driscoll, who reads these threads from the far end of a sofa, offered the only diagnosis anyone has been able to confirm: "He's not hiding the spot. He's hiding the mushroom, and he's doing it from the mushroom's side of the argument."

Asked at 8:05 p.m. what The Forager's Folio expected of a photograph whose subject has been withheld as a location, this column notes that the mushroom is still unidentified, the log is still unidentified, and the shape is still visible.